Social Psychology
INTRODUCTION
The focus of social psychology is to study the behavior of individuals in which it is socially influenced. And this happens from the moment we were born, or even before birth, as historical conditions that they gave birth to a family, which lives with certain people, who survive by working in certain activities, which already influence the way they approach and care for pregnancy and what it means to have a child. This historical-social influence is felt primarily by the acquisition of language. Words, through the meanings attributed by a social group, by a culture, determine a world view, a value system and, consequently, actions, feelings and emotions arising. The general laws of psychology say it is apprehended when reinforced, but it is the history of the group to which the individual belongs that will tell what is reinforcing or punitive.
Like Cherry (2016) writes that it is common for Social Psychology to be confused with popular wisdom, personality psychology, and sociology, and exposes the differences between them. While popular wisdom, which may also be called common sense, is based on anecdotal observations and subjective interpretations, Social Psychology employs scientific methods and empirical studies of social phenomena. Researchers not only make assumptions about how people behave, they plan and conduct experiments that let you highlight the relationship between different variables.
To speak of Social Psychology today is to speak of a subject matter that makes us reflect on subjects such as: concepts, theories and methods that will help us understand different phenomena and relational aspects of social life. Through the study of social psychology we will be more focused on seeing the nature of problems and how they are approached by social psychology, we will also be seeing the historical evolution, looking from their foundation to our day, this means that we will be considering psychology Social as a scientific discipline with its own domain within human and social sciences. Also in this study we will approach the social influence as one of the fundamental mechanisms of your concern showing the domain that the social influence exerts on the individual and the modifications that will imply in the level of the human behavior. Still in this study we will talk about specificity of scientific research in Social Psychology and also general characteristic of methods of Social Psychology.
The History of Social Psychology
Lane (1981) writes that the beginning of social psychology dates back to the 19th century, and the French philosopher Augusto Conte is considered the father of this science. For Conte, Social Psychology would be a by product of Sociology and Moral, being charged with telling how the individual could be, at the same time, cause and consequence of society. However, only after World War I, around 1920, would this branch develop as a scientific and systematic study. In a world shaken by crises and conflicts, researchers have found a field to study extensively to find a way to preserve the values of freedom and human rights in a tense and regimented society. Scientists sought to understand various social phenomena such as leadership, prejudice, propaganda, conflicts of values and how individuals behaved in front of them. In the US, this research was aimed at finding ways to improve man’s life in the social context, using the data and concepts from years of research in psychology. Society was the great object of study at that time, its motivations, attitudes towards certain situations, behavior patterns, in short, everything that demonstrated the existing dichotomy between being and society. As much as one does not exist without the other, they are two different phenomena.
The history of social psychology can be described as the history of social science that reflects multiple efforts to explain social conditions, social actions and the relationships between society and its members (Fenestra, 2013). The history of social psychology helps to better understand the nature of social world. In fact, social psychology plays an important role in helping individuals to have a better understand of the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of other individuals. It is necessary to understand not only social, but also political and material influences on the conceptions of individuals. The history of social psychology is closely connected with the political history because the discipline helps to explore human nature through the application of certain scientific methods. A number of key research developments have helped to define social psychology and differentiate it from other fields of study, including ethical, cultural, behavioral and other types of research developments. The following theoretical constructs are inherent in social psychology principles include the “commonality corollary, the sociality corollary and the fragmentation corollary” (Rogers, 2013, p. 157). The role of ethics in behavioral research is crucial because any form of behavioral research requires not only observation, analysis of human behavior, but also it requires the analysis of by-products of human behavior, such as public opinions. Ethics in behavioral research influences the attitudes of personnel, the behavior of the participants, and other aspects that may have certain impact on society. Some of the ethical dilemmas that researchers face include the issues associated with specific national or cultural context, maintenance of the respect for privacy and confidentiality, etc. One of the examples of an ethical violation that occurred in a human research study includes the violation of moral principles in the form of racial inequality, which leads to racial discrimination and racism. The study well-known as the Tuskegee Syphilis study demonstrates the actual violation of moral norms in relation to African Americans. The methodology used by researchers was observational. Considerable changes could have been made to improve the ethical nature of the research, including the improved ethical standards and the proper control.
The science of social psychology began when scientists first started to systematically and formally measure the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of human beings (Kruglanski & Stroebe, 2011). The earliest social psychology experiments on group behavior were conducted before 1900 (Triplett, 1898), and the first social psychology text books were published in 1908 (McDougall, 1908/2003; Ross, 1908/1974). During the 1940s and 1950s, the social psychologists Kurt Lewin and Leon Festinger refined the experimental approach to studying behavior, creating social psychology as a rigorous scientific discipline. Kurt Lewin was an influential psychologist who is today recognized as the founder of modern social psychology. His research on group dynamics, experiential learning, and action research had a tremendous influence on the growth and development of social psychology. He is also recognized for his important contributions in the areas of applied psychology and organizational psychology.
In 1954, Festinger edited an influential book called Research Methods in the Behavioral Sciences, in which he and other social psychologists stressed the need to measure variables and to use laboratory experiments to systematically test research hypotheses about social behavior. He also noted that it might be necessary in these experiments to deceive the participants about the true nature of the research.
Social psychology was energized by researchers who attempted to understand how the German dictator Adolf Hitler could have produced such extreme obedience and horrendous behaviors in his followers during the World War II. The studies on conformity conducted by Muzafir Sherif (1936) and Solomon Asch (1952), as well as those on obedience by Stanley Milgram (1974), showed the importance of conformity pressures in social groups and how people in authority could create obedience, even to the extent of leading people to cause severe harm to others. Philip Zimbardo, in his well-known “prison study” (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973), found that the interactions of male college students who were recruited to play the roles of guards and prisoners in a simulated prison became so violent that the study had to be terminated early.
Social psychology quickly expanded to study other topics. John Darley and Bibb Latané (1968) developed a model that helped explain when people do and do not help others in need, and Leonard Berkowitz (1974) pioneered the study of human aggression. Meanwhile, other social psychologists, including Irving Janis (1972), focused on group behavior, studying why intelligent people sometimes made decisions that led to disastrous results when they worked together. Still other social psychologists, including Gordon Allport and Muzafir Sherif, focused on intergroup relations, with the goal of understanding and potentially reducing the occurrence of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. Social psychologists gave their opinions in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court case that helped end racial segregation in American public schools, and social psychologists still frequently serve as expert witnesses on these and other topics (Fiske, Bersoff, Borgida, Deaux, & Heilman, 1991). In recent years insights from social psychology have even been used to design anti-violence programs in societies that have experienced genocide (Staub, Pearlman, & Bilali, 2010).
The latter part of the 20th century saw an expansion of social psychology into the field of attitudes, with a particular emphasis on cognitive processes. During this time, social psychologists developed the first formal models of persuasion, with the goal of understanding how advertisers and other people could present their messages to make them most effective (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993; Hovland, Janis, & Kelley, 1963). These approaches to attitudes focused on the cognitive processes that people use when evaluating messages and on the relationship between attitudes and behavior. Leon Festinger’s important cognitive dissonance theory was developed during this time and became a model for later research (Festinger, 1957).
In the 1970s and 1980s, social psychology became even more cognitive in orientation as social psychologists used advances in cognitive psychology, which were themselves based largely on advances in computer technology, to inform the field (Fiske & Taylor, 2008). The focus of these researchers, including Alice Eagly, Susan Fiske, E. Tory Higgins, Richard Nisbett, Lee Ross, Shelley Taylor, and many others, was on social cognition—an understanding of how our knowledge about our social worlds develops through experience and the influence of these knowledge structures on memory, information processing, attitudes, and judgment. Furthermore, the extent to which humans’ decision making could be flawed due to both cognitive and motivational processes was documented (Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982).
In the 21st century, the field of social psychology has been expanding into still other areas. Examples that we consider in this study include an interest in how social situations influence our health and happiness, the important roles of evolutionary experiences and cultures on our behavior, and the field of social neuroscience—the study of how our social behavior both influences and is influenced by the activities of our brain (Lieberman, 2010). Social psychologists continue to seek new ways to measure and understand social behavior, and the field continues to evolve. We cannot predict where social psychology will be directed in the future, but we have no doubt that it will still be alive and vibrant.
When we talk the history of Social Psychology we must talk about Important people in the world of social psychology.
Within the field of social psychology there have been people who have left a great impression. Here are some of them:
• Floyd Allport: Best known for being the founder of social psychology as a scientific discipline.
• Muzafer Sherif: Known for conducting the experiment of the “cave of thieves” where a set of boy scouts was divided into two groups in order to explore prejudice in social groups. The experiment created the Realistic Group Conflict Theory.
• Solomon Asch: Devoted his life to the study of social influence. His studies on conformity are his best-known work, in which he used lines of different sizes to see if the participants would give the wrong answers. They did indeed give the wrong answer, not because they thought the answers they gave were true, but simply to agree with the answers other people gave.
• Kurt Lewin: Known as the founder of modern social psychology. He made contributions to the Gestalt theory, studied the concept of social distance and formulated the field theory. The latter shows that it is impossible to get to
• know true human behavior if they are outside of their own environment.
• Ignacio Martín-Baró: Besides being a psychologist, he was a Jesuit priest. He proposed that psychology should be related to the social and historical conditions of the area where it develops. It should also be related to the aspirations of the people who reside there. He is the creator of the Social Psychology of Liberation.
Other important figures
• Stanley Milgram: Conducted experiments of dubious ethics. The best known is his experiment on obedience to authority. In it, one participant applied electric shocks to another in the presence of figure of authority . The Experiment of the Small World is also his own; this is also known as the six degrees of separation.
• Serge Moskovici: Studied social representations. This is the way in which knowledge is reformulated when groups take it over, thus distorting it from its original form. Serge is also known for his studies on the influence of minorities.
• Philip Zimbardo: Best known for conducting the Stanford Prison Experiment. In this experiment he took some students and divided them into two groups – one group of prison guards and the other of prisoners. He then put them into a mock jail in the basement of the university. They reached the conclusion that it was the situation that caused the behavior of the participants and not their own personalities.
• Albert Bandura: Demonstrated that violence in the media encourages aggressive behavior in those that watch it. He conducted an experiment where a model carried out aggressive behavior on a doll, which was then in turn imitated by children. This is known as the Bobo Doll Experiment. Bandura is the also the creator of the Theory of Self-Efficacy.
What Is Social Psychology?
Social psychology is the study of the dynamic relationship between individuals and the people around them. Each of us is different, and our individual characteristics, including our personality traits, desires, motivations, and emotions, have an important impact on our social behavior. But our behavior is also profoundly influenced by the social situation -Thinking of for a moment about how the people with whom we interact every day. These people include our friends and family, our classmates, our religious groups, the people we see on TV or read about or interact with online, as well as people we think about, remember, or even imagine. how our behavior change when we are around those people.
Psychology is the scientific study of how people act, think, and feel. Social psychology studies how people act, think, and feel in the context of society. That is, how people’s behaviors, thoughts, and feelings change because of other people.
Think back to the example above. Your behavior probably changes depending on who is in the room with you. But even when you’re in a room alone, your thoughts, feelings, and even behaviors are influenced by other people: the thought of someone you don’t like could make you feel angry; the fact that you wash your hands before handling food comes from lessons taught to you by your grandmother; that thing that your crush said this afternoon could replay in your mind as you try to analyze it. In all of these cases, society has an impact on you.
According to psychologist, Gordon Allport social psychology is a discipline that uses scientific methods to understand and explain how the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of other human beings.” Essentially, social psychology is all about understanding how each person’s individual behavior is influenced by the social environment in which that behavior takes place.The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors refer to psychological variables that can be measured in humans. The statement that others’ presence may be imagined or implied suggests that humans are malleable to social influences even when alone, such as when watching videos, sitting on the toilet, or quietly appreciating art. In such situations, people can be influenced to follow internalized cultural norm. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as result of the interaction of mental states and social situations.
Social psychologists examine factors that cause behaviors to unfold in a given way in the presence of others. They study conditions under which certain behavior, actions, and feelings occur. Social psychology is concerned with the way these feelings, thoughts, beliefs, intentions, and goals are cognitively constructed and how these mental representations, in turn, influence our interactions with others.
Social psychology traditionally bridged the gap between psychology and sociology. During the years immediately following Warld War II there was frequent collaboration between psychologists and sociologists.The two disciplines, however, have become increasingly specialized and isolated from each other in recent years, with sociologists focusing on “macro variables” (e.g., social structure) to a much greater extent than psychologists. Nevertheless, sociological approaches psychology remain an important counterpart to psychological research in this area.
In addition to the split between psychology and sociology, there has been a somewhat less pronounced difference in emphasis between American social psychologists and European social psychologists. As a generalization, American researchers traditionally have focused more on the individual, whereas Europeans have paid more attention to group level phenomena.
Social psychology looks at a wide range of social topics, including:
• Group behavior
• Social perception
• Leadership
• Non verbal behavior
• Conformity
• Aggression
. Prejudice
It is important to note that social psychology is not just about looking at social influences, social perception and social interaction are also vital to understanding social behavior. The way that we see other people and the way we think they see us) can play a powerful role in a wide variety of actions and decisions. Just think for a moment about how you sometimes act differently in a public setting than you might if you were at home by yourself. At home you might be loud and rambunctious, while in public you might be much more subdued and reserved.
Topics within social psychology
The themes that social psychology embraces are wide and varied ( Gergen, 1973). By focusing on some of the issues that are its main focus, we can designate its identity social dentity ( Taylor and Moghaddam, 1994) or the degree to which people identify and share characteristics within groups is a factor that social psychology frequently studies . Social identity will often determine how the people will behave. For example, when a person heavily identifies with a group, then their behavior will correspond to the norms and values of that group.
Another classic theme of social psychology is stereotypes (Amossy and Herschberg Pierrot, 2001). Stereotypes are the image we hold of another group. This is usually a simplified and generalized image that seeks to categorize all the members of a specific group. For example, a common stereotype in Europe is that Spaniards are lazy. People who have this stereotype of Spaniards, whenever they happen to interact with one, will think that they are lazy before even getting to know them.
Social Psychology and Other Fields
As you can probably tell, social psychology covers a lot of ground! And because it covers so many different things, social psychology overlaps with many other fields of study.
Anthropology is the study of human culture. Anthropologists study the beliefs and traditions of society. Their focus is on society as a whole, whereas social psychologists want to study the way society affects the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals.
Think about it like this: Anthropologists might study certain religious traditions, such as the way different Christian churches celebrate Easter. But social psychologists are interested in the individual people’s interaction with society, so they might study how religious people behave differently from non-religious people in certain situations.
Sociology has a lot in common with social psychology. Sociologists, like anthropologists, study society as a whole. But instead of looking at the beliefs and traditions of society, their focus is on organizations and how those organizations impact the individuals within them. Like social psychologists, sociologists are interested in the intersection of society and the individual. But sociologists are more focused on society, and social psychologists are more focused on the individual.
For example, imagine that you want to study why so many marriages end in divorce. If you are a sociologist, you will compile all sorts of data on the number of divorces from year to year. You might then compare that information to things going on in society. For example, you might notice that as the percentage of households where the wife works goes up, so do divorce rates. You might also observe differences in divorce rates across class, race, or religious lines.
How Is Social Psychology Different From Other Disciplines?
It is important to differentiate social psychology from a few similar and related subjects. Social psychology is often confused with folk wisdom, personally psychology and sociology. What makes social psychology different? Unlike folk wisdom, which relies on anecdotal observations and subjective interpretation, social psychology employs scientific methods and the empirical study of social phenomena. Researchers do not just make guesses or assumptions about how people behave; they devise and carry out experiments that help point out relationships between different variables.
While personality psychology focuses on individual traits, characteristics, and thoughts, social psychology is focused on situations. Social psychologists are interested in the impact that the social environment and group interactions have on attitudes and behaviors.
Finally, it is important to distinguish between social psychology and sociology. While there are many similarities between the two, sociology tends to look at social behavior and influences at a very broad-based level. Sociologists are interested in the institutions and cultures that influence how people behave. Psychologists instead focus on situational variables that affect social behavior. While psychology and sociology both study similar topics, they are looking at these questions from different perspectives.
What does social psychology investigate?
Social psychology is the scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others (Allport 1998). By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. As an empirical science that attempts to answer a variety of questions about human behavior by testing hypotheses, both in the laboratory and in the field. Such approach tends to study behavior of people at group level more than anything else. It tries to describe and explain human behavior by reducing it to psychological variables . In this way, social psychology seeks to establish theories about human behavior that help to predict behavior patterns before they occur and then to intervene. Knowing what factors promote certain behaviors, it aims to intervene and change these patterns in some way.
Social psychology aims to study social relationships (Moscovici and Markova, 2006). It is argued that social psychological processes differ from individual psychological processes. Social psychology tries to understand group as well as individual behavior when reacting to or thinking about the social environment.
Research Methods
Laboratory experiments, often using volunteer students as subjects, omit many features of daily social life. Such experiments also have been criticized as being subject to bias, since the experimenters themselves may influence the results. Research workers who are concerned more with realistic settings than with rigour tend to leave the laboratory to perform field studies, as do those who come from sociological traditions. Field research, however, also can be experimental, and the effectiveness of each approach may be enhanced by the use of the methods of the other.
Many colleges and universities have a social-psychology laboratory equipped with observation rooms permitting one-way vision of subjects. Sound and video recorders and other devices record ongoing social interaction; computing equipment and other paraphernalia may be employed for specific studies. Social behavior is understood to be the product of innate biological factors resulting from evolution and of cultural factors that have emerged in the course of history. Early writers (e.g., William McDougall, a psychologist) emphasized instinctive roots of social behavior. Later research and writing that tended to stress learning theory emphasized the influence of environmental factors in social behaviour. In the 1960s and ’70s field studies of nonhuman primates (such as baboons) drew attention to a number of similarities to human social behaviour, while research in cultural anthropology has shown that many features of human social behavior are the same regardless of the culture studied. It is coming to be a widely accepted view that human social behavior seems to have a biological basis and to reflect the operation of evolution as in the case of patterns of emotional expression and other nonverbal communication, the structure of language, and aspects of group behaviour.
Much research has been done on socialization (the process of learning from a culture), and learning has been found to interact with innate factors. An innate capacity for language, for example, makes it possible to learn a local language. Culture consists of patterns of behaviour and ways of organizing experience; it develops over the course of history as new elements are introduced from a variety of sources, only some of which are retained. Many aspects of social behaviour can be partly accounted for in terms of their history.
Like Sventsitsky said there is various methods of research in which methods of gathering of the information and methods of its processing in turn differ are analyzed. There are and many other classifications of methods of socially-psychological research. For example, distinguish three groups of methods: 1) methods of empirical research, 2) methods of modeling, 3) управленческо-educational methods (Sventsitsky, 1977. With. 8). Thus in the first group about what speech and in the present chapter will go get all. As if to the second and third groups of the methods designated in resulted classification they do not possess any special specificity in social psychology (that recognize, at least concerning modelling, and authors of classification). Methods of data processing often simply are not allocated in the special block as the majority of them also are not specific to socially-psychological research, and use some general scientific receptions. It is possible to agree with it, but nevertheless for full representation about all methodical arms of social psychology it is necessary to mention existence of this second group of methods.
Among methods of gathering of the information it is necessary to name: supervision, studying of documents (in particular, a content-analysis), a different sort interrogations (questionnaires, interview), a various sort tests (including the most widespread sotsiometrichesky the test), at last, experiment (both laboratory, and natural) whether verged is expedient in the general rate, moreover and in its beginning in detail to characterize each of these methods. It is more logical to specify cases of their application at a statement of separate substantial problems of social psychology then such statement will be much more clear. Now it is necessary to give only the general characteristic of each method and, the main thing to designate those moments where in their application there are certain difficulties. In most cases these methods are identical to that are applied in sociology (Poisons, 1995).
Structural Social Psychology
Structural social psychology originated with the work of economists, psychologists, and sociologists interested in explaining social interactions more formally and mathematically with the goal of creating testable hypotheses. Structural social psychology assumes that social actors are driven by rational concerns centered on maximizing rewards and minimizing punishments. Another related assumption is that interactions based on rational calculations result in formally structured individual, group, and institutional interactions. This approach is related to cognitive and intrapersonal social psychology in the focus on developing formal theories to explain interactions and creating specific hypotheses for testing in experimental situations. More contemporary work in structural social psychology uses more diverse methods such as survey research and participant observation techniques. There are three main theoretical programs that represent this approach: power, exchange, and bargaining studies; social influence and authority studies; and status characteristics, expectation states theory, and social network studies. Each set of studies focuses on different aspects of describing and explaining the underlying structure of social interactions.
Power, exchange, and bargaining studies explore how social interactions can be described as exchanges between social actors with the assumption that individuals rationally calculate the costs and benefits associated with any particular interaction. Exchange studies began with the work of George Homans, Richard Emerson, and Peter Blau. Homans argued that interactions can be better understood as exchanges whereby actors engaged in interactions that brought specific benefits. His work also explored how the need for such exchanges leads to equilibrium between actor and the idea of distributive justice. Blau further specified this work by focusing on the social aspects of such exchanges in terms of how they rely on trust between actors that each person will fulfill his or her unspecified obligations. While Homans, Blau, and others discussed that power arises out of exchanges and that power is not necessarily equally distributed among actors, Emerson and his colleagues specifically explored the development of power, how it is managed by actors, and how power differentiation affects the possibility of future exchanges. More contemporary work building on these ideas is bargain ing studies, which specifies how different types of power differentiation affect the bargaining that then leads to actual exchanges. Lawler and colleagues explored the type of bargaining that occurs prior to exchanges, as well as how differing levels of power among participants affect such bargaining. Molm and her colleagues examined how exchanges varied based on inequality of participants and the availability of other sources and actors.
The second set of studies that can be categorized under the structural social psychology perspective focuses on social influence and authority. The underlying theme of these studies is that there are several factors that encourage people to be influenced by others, including the status or position others hold in comparison to themselves and group encouragement of conformity. The classic studies in social influence include Stanley Milgram’s research that examined the effect an authority figure in a position of power has on individual compliance. Milgram found that individuals overwhelmingly obeyed requests to complete a task that ostensibly required hurting another person. Seymour Asch’s studies of group conformity demonstrated that individuals willingly change their answer or opinion when a majority in the group indicates a different answer or opinion. Contemporary ideas build on this base by examining the varying conditions under which compliance to authority occurs, and to what degree others can influence attitude change.
Status characteristics, expectation states, and social network studies examine how social interactions are based on socially and culturally derived expectations for behavior that people have of one another. These socially and culturally derived expectations are associated with assumed predictions concerning how success fully any individual will contribute to an exchange, or interaction, process. These predictions then determine which individuals are likely to be given the most opportunities for interaction and influence in a group. Originating with the work of Berger, Zelditch, and associates, status characteristics theory explicitly identifies two main types of social characteristics that have expectations for behavior associated with them – diffuse (such as race, gender, class, and ableness) and specific status characteristics (such as job experience, education, and relevant skills) – and it is usually associated with groups working toward achieving specific goals. Expectation states theory argues that those people who hold diffuse and specific status characteristics evaluated as more likely to successfully contribute to achieving group goals will be given a greater number of opportunities for interaction as well as greater social influence among other group members. More to the point, theorists argue, and have successfully demonstrated, that specific and stable hierarchical group structures develop based on these expectations. Contemporary work in this area includes specifying the degree to which different status characteristics affect expectations as well as how such expectations develop and whether actors perceive that such expectations are just. Social network theory and elementary theory build on the ideas of these different approaches in structural social psychology by specifically examining how an actor’s position, relative to another, affects social influence processes as well as the stability of group structure. The underlying assumption of social network theory is that social influence, power, and bargaining are all affected by the way in which actors are networked to one another. Markovsky, Willer, Cook, and their students and associates examine different aspects of how actors are connected to one another and how that affects other social processes.
As the above discussion indicates, the three theoretical approaches in social psychology all examine different aspects of individuals, their interactions, and how their interactions affect groups. Cognitive and intrapersonal social psychology focuses on internal processes that impact whether, and how successfully, interactions occur among people. The insights provided by this perspective help to explain how actors create meanings concerning interactions that then lead to the creation and maintenance of specific social institutions and organizations, as discussed by symbolic interactionists. Finally, structural social psychologists examine how the fluid interactions of symbolic life create formal group structures that then impact on people’s interactions.
CONCLUSION
In our study we see that the Social psychologists believe that human behavior is determined by both a person’s characteristics and the social situation. We saw also that the social situation is frequently a stronger influence on behavior than are a person’s characteristics.
Social psychology is largely the study of the social situation. Our social situations create social influence—the process through which other people change our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and through which we change theirs. In this study we see also our father of new social psychology, Kurt Lewin formalizing the joint influence of person variables and situational variables, which is known as the person-situation interaction, in an important equation:
Behavior = f (person, social situation).
Lewin’s equation indicates that the behavior of a given person at any given time is a function of (depends on) both the characteristics of the person and the influence of the social situation.
We see also the emergence of the American paradigm of social psychology which is different of European paradigm of social psychology. As a generalization, American researchers traditionally have focused more on the individual, whereas Europeans have paid more attention to group level phenomena.
Finally this study does not aim to cover the whole area of social psychology but to leave some basic information such as its history, definitions, methodologies, investigations and the research methods, etc.
I would like to close my conclusion with word of Lieberman, 2010 “We cannot predict where social psychology will be directed in the future, but we have no doubt that it will still be alive and vibrant”.
Bibliographies
Books
Maia, Nelly Aleotti, Psicologia Social, Ensino Programado, Petrópolis 1977.
Fischer, Gustave Nicolas, Os Conceitos Fundamentais da Psicologia Social, Epigénese Desenvolvimento e Psicologia, Instituto PIAGET, Tipografias Peres, 2002.
Vala Jorge and Monteiro Maria Benedita,Psicologia Social, 3* edição, Serviço de Educação Fundação CalousteGulbenkian, Lisboa 1997.
Hadj Taieb Patricia, Psychologies Sociale, Cours pour la validation des crédits licence fondamentale em Education Physique, 2006
Sites
https://opentextbc.ca/socialpsychology/chapter/defining-social-psychology-history-and-principles/ Essay on Social Psychology
https://www.verywellmind.com/social-psychology-4157177
https://exploringyourmind.com/social-psychology-important/
https://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-social-psychology-definition-professions-in-the-field.html
https://www.britannica.com/science/social-psychology
By Kendra Cherry
Updated August 26, 2019
https://www.verywellmind.com/things-you-should-know-about-social-psychology-2795903
https://www.bartleby.com/essay/Social-Psychology-PKGZ4LZTJ
https://sites.google.com/site/socialpsychologyjournal/methodological-problems
https://www.essay.ws/social-psychology-essay/0
https://www.verywellmind.com/social-psychology-research-methods-2795902